Plant proposal draws crowd

Questions abound over electricity-generating facility near I-5

CARLSBAD – A standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 people turned out at a public hearing last night to comment on a proposal to replace the 53-year-old Encina Power Station with a more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly electricity-generating plant.

NRG Energy Inc. wants to build a 540-megawatt power plant on 23 acres next to Interstate 5 and south of Agua Hedionda Lagoon just east of the soon-to-be-obsolete old facility.

The new plant, named the Carlsbad Energy Center, would generate enough electricity to supply 350,000 homes. It is expected to come online in 2010 or 2011 and operate in tandem with a scaled-back Encina Power Station until 2016. The new plant would start generating power quickly to help the region during heat waves when energy demand tends to spike.

The heavy turnout at the hearing showed the community has lots of questions about how compatible the new plant would be. The California Energy Commission, which decides on major power plants, held the meeting at the Carlsbad Operations Center on Faraday Avenue.

Carlsbad resident Ted Viola referred to the 95-acre site owned by NRG Energy as “a profit center” and said he was concerned there is no absolute requirement for the company to retire and dismantle the Encina Power Station and its towering 400-foot smokestack.

NRG Energy officials said they need to keep two of five power-generating steam turbines at Encina operating for at least five years after the new plant is built to help the region meet its energy demands.

The firm has an incentive to tear down the old power plant and smokestack as quickly as possible because doing so would free up nearly 65 acres for a potentially lucrative redevelopment project.

“We share the city's motivation to tear down the old plant,” Steve Hoffman, president of NRG Energy's West Region, said in an interview.

The proposed Carlsbad Energy Center has won praise from environmentalists because its high-tech turbines would require 30 percent less natural gas to generate the same amount of electricity as Encina's dated equipment.

The new plant also would use a modern air-cooling system that eventually would eliminate the need to use the current average of 250 million to 300 millions of gallons of seawater daily to cool the Encina plant. That cooling system kills millions of fish, plankton and other marine life.

But the benefits of the switch to the air-cooling system will be muted because Poseidon Resources is building a desalination plant on NRG's 95-acre site that will draw 100 million gallons of seawater per day to produce 50 million gallons of drinking water.

The Carlsbad Energy Center would require two smokestacks, each about 100 feet tall. Both would be placed in low-lying terrain so that about 70 feet would be visible from I-5.

Residents speaking at the hearing said they wanted any redevelopment of the site to include a park. Some said they wanted assurances that the two smaller smokestacks won't spew pollution that is now discharged by the existing smokestack. Others said they are concerned about noise from the new turbines and that the new plant would be a visual blight if Caltrans removes trees and a earthen berm to accommodate a proposed lane-widening project on I-5.

Energy Commission officials said five more public meetings will be held before the agency renders its decision, tentatively set for November.